The FFW

[tytalan]

War Fleets, ICS Papers, Armies, etc were fun to read (except the TL 12 Army bit ). I don't regret buying them. But they are just loregasms. They don't give me any tools or advice or structures for actual play that I didn't already have. I can run an interstellar war in Traveller just as well now as I could before I bought them.

That’s because it’s not the purpose of FFW to give you tools or advice or structure for running an interstellar war in Traveller. It’s a setting and the fleet and army’s book are resources for running a game in that setting, you complain that they are lore focus but that exactly what a setting is about.

Also what wrong with a TL 12 Army it make sense on so many levels?

 

[tytalan]

You are asserting it is a setting. At no point did anyone from Mongoose suggest such a thing.

I quote from the mongoose FFW page “ Explore the grand campaign setting of The Fifth Frontier War, and witness key events unfold across several new releases in this multi-year story arc.” yes they did say it was a setting repeatedly! Even when they announced it they called it a setting! https://www.mongoosepublishing.com/collections/the-fifth-frontier-war

It has some adventures. But none of them actually rely on anything in the "setting material". Though most of them do say "This will affect how the war goes!" without actually explaining how that's supposed to happen. Again, supposedly Turning Points will do that. I am very curious to see how that is supposed to work, because unless you specifically run it as a campaign of disparate groups doing various things, I don't see how there's any sort of cumulative effect going on. There's still six adventures waiting to be published, but so far, you'd be struggling to get more than two of them into the same group of characters. Aka the typical sort of campaign.

So you think that every adventure in a setting needs to be connected? That doesn’t make sense. Mongoose has literally given us a setting not a campaign. Sorry if it’s not what you wanted but it’s exactly what mongoose said they were going to do. They have given the GMs a new setting to play in

 

[Brian]

To me seems to be taking over the release schedule

 

[Vormaerin]

They are making a lot of books for it. In the past, a big release like this would have been a kickstarter and so it would seem like the schedule was fairly clear. While there was several months in 2024 where everything was 5FW or Invasion, that has not been true for a good while.

What we have a particular freelance author being extremely prolific. It is not reducing the amount of other stuff being produced, though perhaps it is putting art and editing demands that are slowing some projects down a bit. There are 7 other titles not related to the War with release dates, plus the Pioneer Kickstarter and the Singularity Kickstarter. And of the other books being worked on that don't have release dates, 11 of 14 are not 5FW products.